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November 26, 2007

Char’es Burton Marshall, an American who played a major role in drafting Pakistan’s Constitution, wrote in the 1950’s: “‘Freedom,’ said Matthew Arnold. is a good horse, but a horse to ride somewhere,’ The Pakistanis have ridden it in circles and have tired it out.”

By C. L. Sulzberger

PARES—The only two states dreamed up by 1iterry men are Israel and Pakistan and both, for entirely different reasons, are in trouble. Israel stemmed from the ideas of Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jewish journalist, novelist, playwright, who stimulated the political Zionist movement and eventual formation of Israel, where Herzl now is buried. Pakistan was an intellectual conccpt of a Moslem Indian poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal, who set forth the idea in 1930 when independence movements in the British Raj were becoming increasingly active. Iqbal envisioned an entirely Islamic state, separated from the larger Hindu majority.

He suggested it be called Pakistan based on an anagram: P for Punjab, A for Afghan frontier (Northwest Frontier Province), K for Kashmir, S for Sind and Tan for Baluchistan. The I is for pronunciation and represents no region. Punjab, the Northwest Frontier, that part of Kashmir held after war with India, Sind and Baluchistan make up Pakistan today.

Iqbal’s anagram included no piece of bengal. East Bengal became part of Pakistan when India was partitioned but it never had any but religious links with distant West Pakistan. The fish-eating Bengalis speak a different language and are the westernmost extension of Southeast Asia. The largely Urdu-speaking, meat-eating inhabitants f what was left of Pakistan. after the Indian Army helped create the separate state of Bangladesh in 1971. are the easternmost extension of the Middle East.

All that Israel and Pakistan share today is a common literary origin, the concept of religion as a national basis —plus the geographical facts that they lie at the extreme frontiers of the Middle East, enclosing western Asia between them. Israel’s troubles have become familiar to the world since its statehood was proclaimed in 1948. But Pakistan’s troubles are now featured ir1 headlines more and more. Despite the fact that it still includes nearly 70 million inhabitants, its very future as a nation could be put in question.

During its early history Pakistan sought to play a major role. It became indirectly allied with the United Stares through the Baghdad Pact (now CENTO). It became a direct U.S. partner through SEATO. But CENTO nowadays is largely fictional, SEATO doesn’t really exist and Pakistan, which benefited from neither alliance in its clashes with India, is starting to show signs of internal dissolution.

Prime Minister Zulfikar All Bhutto, now fighting for political survival. is a highly intelligent, wealthy, we educated man. For a 1cig time be was the idol of his country’s left although today he is opposed by elements both to the left and right of him.

Once he told me : “I have always been sickened by poverty and economic injustice. I have always had a fire in my heart and a desire to revolutionize our society, to throw away dead weights and build a beautiful new fact. I can’t define my doctrine. Doctrines everywhere are becoming flexible.”

Mr. Bhutto is a considerable orator, as is proper for the boss of a state inspired by a poet. But despite his benevolent visions, he has had to declare martial law and summon the army to quell discontent. Moreover, there are indications that separatist movements could some day get out of

hand in portions of Sind, the Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan, while Kashmir still remains largely Indian- ruled Should Pakistan threaten to disintegrate, the repercussions might well rival those of another Arab Israeli war at the other end of the Middle East. The Shah of Iran told me four years ago, when things were nothing like so bad as now: “My idea is that if Pakistan disintegrates, another Vietnam situation could develop. And Iran simply cannot permit that.

“We will do all in our power to help Pakistan remain as it now is.” He spoke of Soviet propaganda through Afghanistan and Iraq seeking to stir trouble among Northwest Frontier Pathans and among the Baluchis and added: “We must see to it that Pakistan doesn’t fall to pieces. It is in the interests of everyone in this region. The implications would be terrible.”

There is no doubt the consequences of a Pakistani collapse into anarchy would be exceedingly dangerous, but it is unlikely that any foreign power is responsible for current dangers. Char’es Burton Marshall, an American who played a major role in drafting Pakistan’s Constitution, wrote in the 1950’s: “‘Freedom,’ said Matthew Arnold. is a good horse, but a horse to ride somewhere,’ The Pakistanis have ridden it in circles and have tired it out.”

C. L. Sulzberger, a prize-winning foreign correspondent and foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times for nearly 40 years and the author of two dozen books, most of them on foreign policy and world leaders in the cold-war era, died yesterday at his home in Paris. He was 80.

Mr. Sulzberger, who gave up his Op-Ed page column in The Times in 1978 but continued writing his memoirs and books on foreign affairs, died of natural causes after a long illness, his family said.

The son of Leo Sulzberger, he was a nephew of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The Times from 1935 to 1961. He was also a first cousin of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of the paper from 1963 to 1992 and still chairman of the Times Company.

In a career that began in the Great Depression and spanned World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the rise and fall of nations, Mr. Sulzberger roamed the world from his longtime base in Paris to interview historic leaders and to chronicle and analyze the major events of his time. His columns offered portraits of leaders and nations, opinions on foreign news and critiques of American foreign policy. Career Spanned 5 Decades

After graduation from Harvard and five years with other news organizations, Mr. Sulzberger joined The Times in 1939 and was its chief foreign correspondent from 1944 to 1954, when he became a columnist. His column, "Foreign Affairs," appeared three times a week, on the editorial page until 1970, then on the Op-Ed page until his retirement in 1978.

Mr. Sulzberger, who was banned from half a dozen countries for his reporting and won a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1951, ranged over the field of foreign affairs, touching on military power, economics, diplomacy, industrial and agricultural production and especially the ideas and personalities of leaders.

As a reporter and commentator, he had the inestimable gift of a quick study: the ability to land in the morning in Moscow or Beijing, Prague or Johannesburg, and, with the benefit of speedy access to top leaders, to write by nightfall a cogent report giving the impression he had steeped himself in a subject all his life.

From presidents and Prime Ministers in their inner sanctums to royalty in palaces and rebels in mountain strongholds, he crisscrossed and circled the world to talk to and write with insight about Stalin, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Zhou Enlai, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and many heads of government and state, ambassadors and foreign ministers, generals and secret agents. Praise and Criticism

His contacts with the famous and the mighty produced many notable exclusive articles, and he readily took credit for them. And while he was widely praised for his ability to uncover news and to comment upon it in a voice of wide experience and intelligence, some reviewers of his books an academic critics also said his views were pompous, debatable and laden with trivia.

Moreover, while he frequently challenged policy as formulated in Washington and other capitals, critics noted in retrospect that his reporting and commentary often tipped toward the official line of the leaders he covered -- that was, indeed, a general practice of diplomatic reporting in his era.

And he candidly acknowledged that his entree was enormously eased by his role as a Times correspondent and columnist, by his connections to the family that owned the newspaper and especially by the desire of leaders and revolutionaries to get maximum attention for their views through its widely read columns. A Message for Kennedy

At times, Mr. Sulzberger had behind-the-scenes roles in the affairs he wrote about. In "The Last of the Giants," a 1970 book about world leaders he had covered, he recalled that in a 1961 interview in Moscow, Khrushchev asked him to take a message to President Kennedy, and he did so. The contents were never revealed.

Mr. Sulzberger often injected himself into his accounts: "I limped goutily over to the Elysee -- for an appointment with President Pompidou," Henry Kissinger, "no slouch in the art of flattery, assured me that both he and the President thought my column was the best being written," or "I was sitting in the cold lobby of the Moskva Hotel this morning when John Foster Dulles came along, nudged me and suggested we go for a walk."

In 1977, Mr. Sulzberger was accused in an article in Rolling Stone magazine of having had a secret relationship for years with the Central Intelligence Agency. And a C.I.A. official charged that Mr. Sulzberger's Sept. 13, 1967, column on the Soviet K.G.B. had been lifted almost verbatim from an agency briefing paper.

There was no question that Mr. Sulzberger had extensive contacts with C.I.A. station chiefs and agents in many countries. And, it was pointed out, he would have been extremely useful to the agency with his access to foreign leaders and his influential voice in the pages of The Times.

The Times, after an extensive investigation, reported that the C.I.A. had counted a number of American journalists among its paid agents, but denied that Mr. Sulzberger had been among them. Mr. Sulzberger also denied that he ever worked for the C.I.A. or that he had used an agency briefing paper as a column. A Good Listener

A tall, bespectacled man with white hair and a thin smile that captured a blend of worldly wit and solemnity, Mr. Sulzberger was remembered by colleagues at The Times as convivial and generous, a raconteur who could be punditical at times but who also was a good listener and a good friend.

Close acquaintances, too, remembered him as a man who led a double life. There was a darker side to his personality, one that brooded in diaries about not having done more in life and that longed for the privacy of a fishing stream in the Colorado Rockies, where he went each summer, or his villa on the Greek island of Spetsai.

The darker side was illuminated in a 1980 book by Mr. Sulzberger, "How I Committed Suicide: A Reverie." In it, he spoke of profound loneliness after the death of his wife, the former Marina Tatiana Lada, in 1976. They had been married in 1942 and she had often accompanied him on his journeys and made their Paris home a salon for the illustrious and the powerful. 'The Keyes of My Prison'

He also wrote of his departure from The Times, under a mandatory retirement program then in effect, and of the sense that he had outlived his era. And he declared: "How right Donne was, I thought, when he wrote, 'Mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword' -- except it was mine own gun and not my sword."

Cyrus Leo Sulzberger was born in New York City on Oct. 27, 1912, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1934. While he wanted to go into journalism and had close family connections to The Times, he chose to start elsewhere to establish his name.

He started as a general assignment reporter for The Pittsburgh Press and a year later went to Washington for the United Press, covering labor, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve system. He later went to Europe and worked for The London Evening Standard and other newspapers and periodicals in the United States and Europe.

Joining The Times in 1939 as a young foreign correspondent at the outbreak of World War II, he traveled 100,000 miles through 30 countries in his first three years on the job, sending reports from the Balkans, North Africa, Italy, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and capitals and front lines across a war-torn Europe. Arrest and Expulsion

He wrote so many provocative articles about Balkan and Axis politics that he was successively banned from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Italy. "A creeping tarantula, going from country to country, spreading poison," the Italian propagandist Virginio Gayda wrote of him. In 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia and accused of being a British spy; he was later released without a trial.

As chief correspondent of The Times from 1944 to 1954, he directed the coverage of the end of the war in Europe with a distinguished group that included Drew Middleton, Raymond Daniell, Herbert L. Matthews, Clifton Daniel and James Reston.

After the war, Mr. Sulzberger chronicled the division of Europe into Western and Communist spheres, analyzed rival guerrilla movements in Yugoslavia and drew out for readers the complex character of Tito and won a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1951 for an exclusive prison-cell interview in Yugoslavia with Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, whose 1946 conviction on war-crimes charges signaled the start of the postwar struggle between church and state in Eastern Europe.

While he knew many world leaders on a first-name basis, he was perhaps most intimate with de Gaulle, the French statesman whose career and complex character filled scores of columns and many chapters of Mr. Sulzberger's books. Books on Foreign Affairs

Mr. Sulzberger's many books included "The Big Thaw," published in 1956, a personal exploration of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe under the Khrushchev regime; "What's Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy," a 1959 critique; "A Long Row of Candles," a 1969 memoir; "The Fall of Eagles," a 1977 volume on the collapse of the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, and "Seven Continents and Forty Years," a 1977 chronicle of Mr. Sulzberger's career.

Reviewers sometimes criticized Mr. Sulzberger's books for being repetitious, for injecting the author too much into accounts of conversations with interview subjects, and for too much trivia in the bulky volumes: what King Paul of Greece wore, and where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower bought cheap clothing.

But more typically reviewers praised him for indefatigable reporting, for courage on dangerous assignments and for what Paul Grimes, reviewing "Seven Continents and Forty years," called his "sharp succinct portraits" of world leaders, and he listed a few: "She looks like a simple grandmother but she is obdurate and hard as nails," (Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel), and "a small, pipe-smoking man with an unctuous manner . . . the face of a halibut with shark's eyes." (Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Britain). Decline of U.S. Power

Theodore H. White, in a review of "What's Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy," said Mr. Sulzberger had documented "in overwhelming and appalling detail," how the United States had lost power in the postwar years and the 1950's. "Mr. Sulzberger's unique opportunities as global investigator for The Times are buttressed by his knowledge of history," Mr. White declared.

Among Mr. Sulzberger's honors were Overseas Press Club awards for the best consistent reporting from abroad in 1951, and for excellence in reporting and writing in 1957 and 1970.

He is survived by a son, David Alexis Sulzberger, of London; a daughter, Marina Sulzberger Berry, of London, and two grandchildren. The family said the funeral would be private.

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